The unique thing that literature provides is to be able to step so fully into another situation and condition.

The accolades, just like the scrapes and bruises, fade in the end, and all you're left with is your ambition.

I read like an animal. I read under the covers, I read lying in the grass, I read at the dinner table. While other people were talking to me, I read.

Sometimes I thought about nothing and sometimes I thought about my life. At least I made a living. What kind of living? A living. It wasn't easy. I found out how little is unbearable.

What is literature, really? Boiled down to a single sentence, I'd say it's this: an endless conversation about what it means to be human. And to read literature is to engage in that conversation.

I have always written about characters who fall somewhere in the spectrum between solitary and totally alienated.

She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.